Lifeboat Foundation

New research from the University of Sussex holds promise for extending life expectancy and enhancing treatment options for a common and aggressive brain cancer affecting thousands in the UK annually and hundreds of thousands globally.

Published in the Journal of Advanced Science, the study revealed that the protein PANK4, previously overlooked, can hinder cancer cells’ response to chemotherapy in glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer and if the protein is removed, cancer cells respond better to the main chemotherapy drug used globally for the treatment of glioblastoma.

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Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center made waves earlier this year when it announced the completion of a clinical trial that saw colorectal cancer in 18 patients disappear.

The patients received a drug that helped their immune system target and attack cancer cells, driving their cancer into remission and rendering it undetectable within six months.

Now, Lehigh Valley Health Network has joined a select group of networks and hospitals participating in the expanded clinical trial of the drug.

The universe, with its myriad mysteries, has long captivated our curiosity, and among its enigmatic phenomena, black holes have held a prominent place. These collapsed cores of dead stars, known for devouring everything in their vicinity, have a cosmic counterpart that challenges our understanding – the elusive ‘white holes.’

Imagine delving into the intricacies of space-time around a black hole, subtracting the collapsed star’s mass, and unveiling the mathematical description of a white hole – a massless singularity. Unlike their gravitational counterparts, black holes, where matter disappears into an event horizon, white holes defy entry. They expel matter at an astonishing rate, akin to hitting a cosmic ‘rewind’ button.

A team of researchers has won funding from the US Air Force Office of Scientific Research to address the challenges posed by silicon spin qubits.

This could be useful for the sports industry among other areas.

Recent technological advances have enabled the development of increasingly sophisticated sensors, which can help to advance the sensing capabilities of robots, drones, autonomous vehicles, and other smart systems. Many of these sensors, however, rely on individual cameras, thus the accuracy of the measurements they collect is limited by the cameras’ field of view (FOV).

Researchers at Beihang University in China recently developed a new multi-camera differential binocular vision sensor with a wider FOV that could collect more accurate measurements. This sensor, introduced in a paper published in Optics & Laser Technology, could be integrated into a wide range of devices and smart robotic systems.

“Aiming at the high-precision requirements of environment perception for unmanned aerial vehicle detection, robot navigation, and autonomous driving, inspired by the multi-camera module of mobile phones, we introduced a visual perception mode based on the principle of high-precision binocular vision measurement,” Fuqiang Zhou, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore. “This principle involves a central high-resolution camera and peripheral auxiliary cameras that work together.”

In an interview with WIRED, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says the biggest breakthroughs in AI are yet to come—and will take more than just chips.

The notoriously pessimistic AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky is back with a new prediction about the future of humankind.

“If you put me to a wall,” he told The Guardian in a fascinating new interview, “and forced me to put probabilities on things, I have a sense that our current remaining timeline looks more like five years than 50 years. Could be two years, could be 10.”

If you’re wondering what “remaining timeline” means in this context, The Guardian’s Tom Lamont interpreted it as the “machine-wrought end of all things,” a “Terminator-like apocalypse,” or a “Matrix hellscape.”

Macquarie University neuroscientists have developed a single-dose genetic medicine that has been proven to halt the progression of both motor neuron disease (MND) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) in mice—and may even offer the potential to reverse some of the effects of the fatal diseases.

It may also hold opportunities for treating more common forms of dementia, such as Alzheimer’s disease, which is the second most common cause of death in Australia after heart disease.

The new treatment, dubbed CTx1000, targets pathological build-ups of the protein TDP-43 in cells in the brain and spinal cord.